It was the gruesome murder that shocked the country – a grandmother battered to death before being chopped up and scattered in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains.
Patricia O’Connor, 61, was beaten with a hurley in her own home before being dismembered into 15 different parts and strewn across nine remote locations.
The seven-week trial at the Central Criminal Court heard Patricia, from Mountainview Park, Rathfarnham, Dublin, was hit in the head at least three times before being butchered and cut into little pieces with DIY tools.
But what made the case even more shocking was that several members of her own extended family found themselves on trial in relation to the slaying.
On Tuesday, Kieran Greene, 35, the then partner of her 41-year-old daughter Louise O’Connor was found guilty of murdering retired hospital worker Patricia in the bathroom of her family home.
Louise was before the court as well and was convicted of impeding the apprehension or prosecution of Greene, knowing or believing him to have murdered Patricia on May 29, 2017.
And Louise’s daughter, Stephanie, 22, Patricia’s granddaughter, was convicted of the same charge.
Then yesterday, handyman Keith Johnston, 43, a “trusted member” of Patricia’s extended family, was convicted of helping Greene buy DIY tools knowing or believing him to have murdered the gran.
Johnston, of Avonbeg Gardens, Tallaght, South Dublin, is the ex-partner of Louise, and is father to two of her five children, including Stephanie.
Louise and Stephanie O’Connor and Keith Johnston will be sentenced on April 20 for their roles in the cover-up.
Kieran Greene will receive a mandatory life sentence on that date. Patricia’s husband Gus O’Connor, 75, will also be sentenced – he had earlier pleaded guilty to reporting his wife as a missing person knowing she was already dead.
Yesterday, after the final of the four guilty verdicts was delivered, Patricia’s family said: “Justice has been served for our beautiful sister, who met her demise through tragic circumstances.”
Rita Slevin, Valerie Slevin and Anne O’Sullivan said their sister was the “most kind, caring and loving grandmother, sister and mother”.
They added: “It has been a very tough seven weeks sitting in that courtroom looking at the people that took our sister for their own selfish reasons.”
The family apologised to the people who found the first body parts of Patricia in the mountains, saying: “We are so sorry you had to endure part of our pain and we thank you for co-operating and helping the gardai in every way you could.”
Rita said it was “disgusting to think someone could put down their own mother like that”.
It was with a description of a highly-charged home life that the prosecution team opened their case to the jury.
Life with Patricia, Greene told
interviewing detectives, had been “a nightmare”.
Greene told gardai his partner’s mother was a verbally abusive person who had threatened to have his family killed. She also told his daughters that they should be raped, he had claimed.
In all, the trial heard 15 separate body parts were found at nine different locations over a 30km range in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains between June 10 and 14.
Late on the evening of June 12, Gda PJ Foley noticed a man “of nervous disposition” sitting alone in the waiting room of Rathfarnham Garda station.
Giving his name as Kieran Greene, the man described having a physical row with Patricia in the bathroom of their house, whereby she hit him with a hurley and he reacted by pushing her and she fell back.
The accused man said there was blood everywhere and he had taken her body up the mountains when she became unresponsive.
Greene told Det Sgt Lucy Myles he had scattered the body parts in the Dublin mountains, cut them up and “threw them all over the place up there”.
Asked why he had killed Patricia, he replied: “I was getting out of the shower when she came in and she started shouting and screaming at me.
“She then picked up one of the kid’s hurls outside the bathroom door and started hitting me. I grabbed it and hit her back. Next thing I remember is coming around and she was lying on the floor with blood everywhere.”
He said after Patricia O’Connor became unresponsive, he carried her upstairs to her bedroom, something he described as a “bleeding miracle” as she was heavier than he was.
An hour later he put her in the boot of her own Toyota Corolla car and drove her to Wexford, where he dug a shallow grave and covered her with clay.
Greene said he began to panic a few days later that a farmer would find the body, so he returned to Wexford to “cut her up” using a hacksaw before he scattered the body parts and the tools in the mountains.
He told gardai what had happened “was eating him up”, that he could not sleep and felt “sick, weird and horrible”.
It was the State’s case that, in order to cover up the murder, Stephanie dressed up as her grandmother as “a ruse” to pretend she had stormed out of the house on the night of May 29.
The prosecution’s contention was that Patricia was already dead in the house at the time.
In September 2017, Louise,
Stephanie and Gus were arrested on suspicion of murder.
They will be sentenced on April 20 along with Johnston for their part in the cover-up.
Murderer Greene will be sentenced to life on that date.
